I know what you’re thinking. “Wasn’t this album released in the 70s?” You’d be thinking right too. 1973 in fact! But since John Cale is currently touring his most commercialised album, I thought I’d give it a run through.
The record was Cale’s third solo album and is considerably straightforward compared to some of his more avant garde works, or his noisy contributions to The Velvet Underground in the late 60s.
Opening with the autobiographical ‘Child’s Christmas In Wales’, Cale begins to sonically dream up an image of a dreary world full of unnoticed intricacies that Cale manages to add a certain beauty to. ‘Paris 1919’ paints pictures. That’s what it does. It doesn’t make you dance, or relax. It makes you see and feel.
The droopy horn section that drives ‘The Endless Pain Of Fortune’ provides a bed for some insight into the lives of many. It is not through explicit storytelling that Cale manages to do this, rather abstract sentences that could be interpreted to mean almost anything.
In a recent interview, Cale admitted that he is still trawling through the nearly 40 year old songs wondering what he was on about, so feeling lost in the record is not something to be ashamed of, more something to wear as a badge of honour.
Despite Cale’s lyrical ambiguity, he manages to drape an emotional cape over you that immerses you in his world of simplistic awe. The beautiful ‘Andalucia’ talks of an unrequited love and inflicts this torment on the listener. “I’ll be here waiting later and later, hoping the night will go away, Andalucia castles and Christians, Andalucia come to stay,” he sings. “You were lost once before on a day much like this, when you’d made up your mind not to come, and I couldn’t persuade you, or wait ‘till tomorrow or pass the time.”
The album is not all dark, harrowing sorrow though. As ‘Andalucia’ slips into your memory, ‘Macbeth’ helps you forget your troubles by providing a chance to get your boogie on.
Cale’s ability to grab you and whisk you away into a world of your own is what makes this album so unique. ‘Paris 1919’ is not an album. ‘Paris 1919’ is a film with no pictures.
John Cale will perform ‘Paris 1919’ as part of the Melbourne Festival 2010 with Orchestra Victoria and his own band at the Arts Centre on Saturday, September 19. Tickets are available here.
Follow the author Tim Cashmere on Twitter.
